Government Operations Committee on June 5th, 2014

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

Good morning and welcome to the 30th meeting of the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates.

This morning the Privy Council Office will speak to its most recent report on the Public Service of Canada for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2014. I have the pleasure of welcoming Mr. Wouters, who is Clerk of the Privy Council and Secretary to the Cabinet, as well as Ms. Charette who is Deputy Clerk of the Privy Council and Associate Secretary to the Cabinet.

You have 10 to 15 minutes for your opening remarks. Committee members will then ask questions until 9:45 a.m.

Thank you for being with us this morning. Without further ado, you have the floor.

[Wayne Wouters, Clerk of the Privy Council and Secretary to the Cabinet, Privy Council Office]

Thank you.

I want to thank you, Mr. Chairman, for this opportunity to meet with the committee to discuss my annual report to the Prime Minister on the public service of Canada.

As noted, I am the Clerk of the Privy Council. I'm also the secretary to the cabinet and head of the federal public service. Joining me today is my teammate at PCO, Janice Charette, who is the deputy clerk.

Before I begin, I want to say that my thoughts and prayers go out to the families of the RCMP members who lost their lives in the line of duty last night in Moncton, New Brunswick. As many of you know, the RCMP are part of the public service family. Our hearts and prayers go to the families in this terrible tragedy, and we hope the perpetrator will be apprehended without more violence.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to say that, Mr. Chair.

As the committee is aware, the Privy Council Office has a wide mandate that falls within three broad categories. First, we provide professional, non-partisan advice and support to the Prime Minister, the ministers within the Prime Minister's portfolio and cabinet. Second, we support the functioning of the cabinet's decision-making process and facilitate the implementation of the government's agenda.

Today I would like to focus on the third element of my responsibilities. As head of the public service of Canada, it is a privilege and an honour to lead the women and men of Canada's public service. I work with senior leadership of the federal public service to ensure that the Government of Canada has the people, the systems, and the processes to design and to deliver high-quality policy, programs, and services to and for Canadians. This responsibility also includes making sure that the public service can deliver for Canadians today and, more importantly, in the future.

To that end, we are in the process of transformation and renewal throughout the public service. Last month, we presented two documents that are central to this process. The first is the “Twenty-First Annual Report to the Prime Minister on the Public Service of Canada”, the fifth such report that I have tabled since becoming clerk. How time flies.

The federal public service is the largest employer in the country, with approximately 262,000 employees located in 1,600 locations across Canada. We are in essentially every major community across this great country and have staff in over 180 countries around the world. It is also the country's most diverse workforce, spanning a multitude of professions and lines of business. This includes, among others, scientists, engineers, medical personnel, lawyers, economists, and, of course, enforcement professionals, just to name a few.

This year's report highlights some of the notable achievements of the federal public service over the last year, from responding to the Lac-Mégantic disaster and the floods in Alberta, to the drawdown of Canada's mission in Afghanistan. Public service employees conducted negotiations on free trade agreements with the European Union and with Korea. Also, we've introduced a single government website: www.canada.ca.

Over the past year, we have made important progress in improving the way we manage the public service, such as launching a new performance management system and modernizing our Government of Canada pension and compensation systems.

Also, we have sought to significantly reduce cost and streamline operations; for example, the consolidation of email and other technologies.

The report outlines how the federal public service is moving on many different fronts, including improving performance and productivity across departments and agencies, and addressing the wellness of federal employees by bringing disability and sick leave in line with leading practices.

But the report also emphasizes the challenges the public service faces. This is a pivotal time for the public service of Canada, and the environment in which we operate continues to change in fundamental ways. This is a challenge that public service institutions around the world are facing. In a world connected by technology and reshaped by globalization, issues move across borders and around the world in a nanosecond. Canadians increasingly expect seamless integrated services and they want these services delivered in a convenient way, whether across traditional channels or through new technology. In such a complex and involving environment, positioning the public service to be responsive and of course, agile, well equipped to serve Canadians and the government, requires a commitment to transforming how we operate.

Public service modernization has been an ongoing process characterized by steady incremental changes to how we do business. This is not going to be sufficient for the kinds of challenges we are facing. These are the challenges that brought us to an initiative called Blueprint 2020. Mr. Chairman, all successful organizations need to regularly reflect on the changing environment—what I've just talked about—and how they need to do business differently and ensure that they can meet the expectations of those they serve. Canada's public service is no different. It evolves with Canadians, and it has a successful history of responding and adapting to meeting Canada's needs, all the while remaining dedicated to the values and ethics code, which serves to maintain public confidence in the integrity of the public service.

The world in which the public service operates is continuing to change in fundamental ways, and our institution must keep pace to serve Canada and Canadians now and into the future.

In my annual report to the Prime Minister last year I called for a clear and shared vision of what Canada's public service should be and for ideas about how to achieve this vision. I asked deputies to launch a conversation on the future of the public service and I invited all public servants across the country to take part in this important dialogue about our shared future. As many of you know, about 60% of our public servants live outside Ottawa and the national capital region. This led us to the official launch of Blueprint 2020 on June 7, 2013, where I shared with public servants across the country live via webcast an outline of this initiative.

Blueprint 2020 is a vision developed by and for public servants, which promotes a whole-of-government approach to ensure we are serving Canadians with a capable and a high-performing workforce that embraces both innovation and transformation, and it was guided by four principles. Let me go through those quickly.

First is an open and networked environment that engages citizens and partners for the public good. This would be delivered through the second principle, a whole-of-government approach that enhances service delivery and value for money that in turn would be enabled by number three, a modern workplace that makes smart use of new technologies to improve networking, access to data, and customer service, and combined with number four, a capable, competent, and high-performing workforce that embraces new ways of working and mobilizing the diversity of talent to serve Canada's evolving needs.

For Blueprint 2020 I want to ensure the engagement, the active involvement, and contribution of all public servants, public servants at all levels in all those regions I talked about, since it is through their work realities and their experiences that we can find the necessary ingredients to ensure the public service remains a forward-looking and world-class institution.

For that reason, the Blueprint 2020 initiative has been different in significant ways.

It is the largest engagement exercise ever undertaken in the public service, the first of course to use social media to connect and engage with public servants directly.

It was bottom-up, with public servants offering their opinions, their views, their ideas, their solutions to improve their own workplaces and to work better to serve Canadians. Executives and managers were required to listen and to learn from these views.

Finally, it is transparent, with departments, agencies, and functional communities posting their reports on internal social media for all public servants to see in a way that couldn't be done in the past.

We made unprecedented use of web 2.0 tools, including social media platforms, so that we received input from a very wide cross-section of public service employees at all levels. We used such collaborative tools as GCpedia, our government-wide wiki; GCconnex, our government-wide professional social networking platform; and GCForums, our government-wide web page created to enable teams of employees working on similar projects to interact and engage files on the web, all in order to share ideas and best practices across departments and agencies and, of course, among our functional network communities.

Mr. Chairman, more than 110,000 public servants in over 100 departments and agencies participated directly in Blueprint 2020 activities. This is why we say it was the largest engagement we have ever had in the public service. We also heard from public service communities. We have a federal youth network. They reported in and gave their views. We have the communications community and the national managers community.

Through this input, employees overwhelmingly embraced the vision and came forward with their ideas, suggestions, and best practices. Employees helped prioritize the ideas and they identified concrete ways we could achieve the vision. Departments and agencies developed plans to make changes in their own organizations.

Mr. Chairman, just last month we released “Destination 2020”, a key report that highlights the ideas that have come out of the Blueprint 2020 dialogue from employees across the country. We set out the initial government-wide actions. We looked at all the ideas and all the views, and we were able to determine that, based on all of those suggestions, there were basically five areas of key interest: first, innovative practices and networking; second, processes and empowerment; third, technology; fourth, people management; and fifth, fundamentals of the public service.

The report focuses on implementation and outcomes, and confirms that continued engagement will be key as we move forward. In fact, it launches the next phase of the Blueprint 2020 process.

The vast majority of ideas can be acted upon within organizations and local offices. These are ideas from public servants coming to us that we think they can actually implement themselves, wherever they are in the country. Many public servants are already acting upon those ideas.

But complementing these actions, “Destination 2020” announces initiatives that will be undertaken across the public service. Under the theme of innovative practices and networking, for for example, initiatives under way include “Dragon's Den” events allowing employees to bring forward creative solutions to policy and operational challenges. Many departments are actually doing this. We did this in PCO. Great ideas came out of it, because it went directly to employees, who essentially know the workplace as well as anyone.

Moving forward, departments and agencies will bring diverse resources together into “tiger teams” to speed up adoption of good ideas. For example, the Treasury Board Secretariat has a multidisciplinary team that will engage public servants and various departments to identify and address end-users' internal red tape irritants, which really came out in our collaboration with public servants, and pilot solutions with the potential to be replicated across government.

At my department, the Privy Council Office, we're going to lead the creation of a central innovation hub to provide expertise and advice to support departments and apply new approaches to address policy, program, and service challenges.

Under the second theme, process and empowerment, we will cut the red tape that ties up internal processes and makes it hard for public servants to do their jobs. We will also identify ways in which employees can connect more directly with senior managers. This is an issue that came up in our collaborations.

Under the theme of technology, we are in a connected world. New public servants particularly are interested in what we are doing in this whole area of technology. We're going to develop a new version of the government electronic directory service to post detailed employee profiles and a competency-based search function. We will make better use of video conferencing, Wi-Fi access, and other tools to support a mobile workforce.

Also, we will build upon those collaborative tools that we used in Blueprint 2020, GCpedia and GCconnex, so they work better together in serving Canadians.

On the people management side, we will simplify the approaches to job descriptions. We will speed up staffing based on best practices, and there are best practices. Indeed, a number of departments have come up with risk-based staffing that we think we can apply across the public service. Also, we'll provide new opportunities for continuous learning, including in the area of second languages.

Finally, under the fifth theme, fundamentals of the public service, we will enable our employees to help shape the public service image: who we are and what we do in our communities for Canadians. I believe we have one of the best public services in the world, but many Canadians are not aware of what we can do and what we do, even though the work done by public servants affects the lives of Canadians each and every day.

Those are examples of some of the initiatives we will undertake as a result of the “Destination 2020” report. An agile, nimble, and effective public service is essential to the well-being of Canadians. It fuels productivity and supports high-quality service delivery.

Building the public service of tomorrow won't happen overnight. Transformational change takes time, but I can assure you, Mr. Chairman, that I am fully committed to seeing this change take place, as are senior executives across the public service.

Our goal is to ensure that the public service of Canada remains a world-class institution that is professional, non-partisan and respects its code of values and ethics.

The dialogue will continue as we build the public service of the future, positioning Canada to have a well-functioning and high-performing public service for years to come.

Blueprint 2020 has reminded us that public service employees are very proud of the many roles they play in the daily lives of Canadians. From agents protecting our borders, to Service Canada staff answering Canadians' questions, analysts shaping policy, and our diplomats carrying Canadian values around the world, public servants care passionately about the future of the public service, and they care passionately about this great country.

They responded with enthusiasm to the Blueprint 2020 process and they demonstrated their pride and commitment by contributing thousands of forward-looking ideas to improve our institution. The level of engagement shown by them during this initiative I think is a celebration of the public service resolve to continuously seek ways to better serve Canadians.

Merci. We'd be open for questions.

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

Thank you for your presentation and for the time you have given us this morning.

Without further ado, I will now give the floor to committee members, starting with Mr. Ravignat, for five minutes.

[Mathieu Ravignat, NDP, Pontiac, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

And thank you, Mr. Wouters, for your presence and for making yourself available.

I'd like to start on something that I think is fundamentally important in having this conversation. I can hear your sincere admiration for the public service. I've followed your career, and I know that it's there and it's honest, but you're in a difficult situation, because you're functioning under a government that doesn't actually respect the public service.

In fact, we've seen this time and time again from the President of the Treasury Board. Whether we're talking about pensions, or about the way affectation went forward, or sick leave, or the increased amount of psychological distress in the public service, time and time again, the government and the President of the Treasury Board have attacked the reputation of the public service.

What I find distressing about your report is how it glosses over some of these challenges. It seems to me that you do have a role to speak truth to power and to tell the President of the Treasury Board and this government that not all is rosy in the public service. I think public servants who are listening now would probably like to hear from you with regard to the day-to-day challenges they face under this government.

[Wayne Wouters]

I thank the honourable member for his question, Mr. Chairman.

I think the only way I could respond to that is to come back this collaboration that we just completed with over 110,000 public servants. The nature of the response across the country, whether it was in Halifax, Nova Scotia, or in Prince George, British Columbia, was very much about “what are the tools and the technology that I need to do my job?” Their concern is how they can ensure, as they go forward as public servants, that they have the competencies and the tools to be able to deliver the programs and services they do each and every day.

[Mathieu Ravignat, NDP, Pontiac, QC]

And they're not concerned about the future of their jobs?

[Wayne Wouters]

Let me complete my response. They are very much concerned about the things they raised with us. I've outlined many of those. As I said, tools and technology were their major concerns. This issue of respect and trust—

[Mathieu Ravignat, NDP, Pontiac, QC]

Mr. Wouters, thank you. They must have raised some fundamental questions with regard to the environment in which they're working, as well as the way they have been treated by this government.

I'm sure they didn't just tell you that it's about technology and innovation. I'm sure they told you things, and those things are just not reflected in your report. I think it's a fair question to ask you why.

[Wayne Wouters]

Mr. Chairman, I am only reporting what we heard through our collaborative efforts with the 110,000 public servants. From coast to coast, the rank and file's major concern was, “I want to do a good job. I think I'm doing a good job. I need to continue to do a good job. What do I need to do that?”

This issue of trust came up, but it did not come up very much in our whole collaboration. What was most important to them, as I said, is that they are bothered by the time it takes to staff positions. They're concerned about some of the processes we have in place.

[Mathieu Ravignat, NDP, Pontiac, QC]

Okay. Let's talk about staffing then, because when we deal with staffing we have to deal with collective agreements. So you're talking about a new model for staffing called risk-based staffing. At this point where are you with your consultations with the public service unions on this question? Is this something you have buy-in on? Your entire project is predicated on buy-in. You have to have a public servant who believes in the project.

Some of them would say that we've been through this all before, this kind of visioning exercise. But if you don't have a public service that has a buy-in, that doesn't feel respected, it's going to be very difficult to go forward with this.

So with regard to staffing, what have you done to get that buy-in?

[Wayne Wouters]

Again, on the staffing side I think what we heard, as I noted, was about the time it takes to staff—and staffing is a responsibility of management. Many public servants feel that the process is simply too long.

[Mathieu Ravignat, NDP, Pontiac, QC]

Actually, it's a shared responsibility, Mr. Wouters. Staffing is not just a question of management. There are practices and standards that are in place. Some of that is governed by agreements with bargaining units.

As you know, and you very well know how complex staffing issues can be, if this is going to work it's predicated on a good relationship with the public service unions. Are you going to tell the government that that relationship has to improve?

[Wayne Wouters]

Again, on the staffing side we do feel that there are many ways that we can improve staffing. Of course, what's most important for us is to continue to have a merit based, non-partisan public service, and so we have to respect those fundamental values of the public service. Therefore, having positions subject to competition is still very much a part of it, but there are many other ways that we can staff. We can transfer people in. We can do other things like that.

So we are going to continue to respect the fundamental values of our staffing system, but find ways where we can to speed it up. What we heard from public servants is that's what they want us to do and we're trying to respond to that.

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

Thank you.

Mr. Trottier has the floor for five minutes.

[Bernard Trottier, Conservative, Etobicoke—Lakeshore, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I would like to thank Mr. Wouters and Ms. Charette for being here with us this morning.

In a prior life before getting into politics I worked for and on behalf of large global organizations, sometimes with hundreds of thousands of employees, in the private sector. I see some similarities in the language in Blueprint 2020, the idea of painting a vision, trying to highly mobilize hundreds of thousands of people to work towards a common set of objectives and a goal.

I see you've borrowed language from private organizations, when you say things like tiger teams and so on. These things are proven ways of mobilizing people.

The one big difference I suppose with the public sector is that you're not talking about taking on new markets and increasing market share and increasing the size of the organization and expanding into new countries and taking over competitors. It's a whole different set of objectives.

I'm wondering how you drive the culture as a leader of this organization. Absent those kinds of incentives, you can't offer stock options. You can't offer other things. There are things you can do in terms of performance measures and objectives, and I know there's more of an incentive-based rewards system now in the public sector. Could you talk about how the culture within the Canadian public service has changed, incorporating some of these methods to motivate and to mobilize people?

[Wayne Wouters]

I think culture is a very complex thing, and I would say that we have many cultures in the public service. Every department has its own history. My first deputyship was in Fisheries and Oceans, which had preceded Confederation. The culture there is different from the culture at PCO. I think that's just the nature of our business.

But I do think there are many ways in which we can create the incentives. Clearly public servants aren't necessarily there for huge financial incentives, but I think what they feel strongly about is that they can make a difference in the lives of Canadians. I think that's why most public servants do come to work every day. Our job as senior leaders is to recognize that and celebrate when we do kind of neat things for Canadians. You know, we're doing that every day.

Examples keep coming back my way. For instance, the border agency has just recently come up with a new program so that if you are travelling to the United States you can basically find out wait times through their website. So you can make a determination, if you are a trucker, as to which border point you want to go across. They are also very much trying to speed up individuals going through airports by automating some of the work there.

We have many things to celebrate. We have Public Service Week coming up, in which we're going to recognize over 120 public servants for the great work they've done. The other thing we felt we needed to do, which perhaps we weren't doing as well as we should have been, was to ensure that we have a solid performance management system in place for the public service. This idea is now being implemented.

There are three key aspects to that.

First, at the start of every year, the manager is to sit down with his employees and basically lay out and write up the objectives for the year.

The second component is that at the end of the year, another conversation takes place, which is an assessment of that particular employee's performance. Through that, we celebrate our high performers. We work with those who perhaps need training or need other support, and, of course, there are those whom we call our “non-performers”. We try to figure out if they are in the wrong job, whether we need to move them, or whether we need to deal with them differently.

Performance management is a key aspect of how we continue to drive the cultural changes we want. We can then look in each organization at the changes we want to make. Those can be in the performance agreements of each of our employees. That's one way of doing it. You know that is done in the private sector as well.

[Bernard Trottier, Conservative, Etobicoke—Lakeshore, ON]

If I have some time, Mr. Chair, that leads me to my next question about annex B.

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

You have 15 seconds.

[Bernard Trottier, Conservative, Etobicoke—Lakeshore, ON]

I have a really quick question about the profile of the public sector and some significant changes and how those tie in with the performance management system.

Annex B is showing the profile changing, not only in the total numbers in the public sector.

[Wayne Wouters]

Do you have a specific...?

[Bernard Trottier, Conservative, Etobicoke—Lakeshore, ON]

I just notice there are far fewer senior executives and there is some growth within the middle ranks. So there is a re-profiling of the public service.

[Wayne Wouters]

Through our DRAP exercise, we saw a reduction in all levels of the rank and file but also some significant reductions at the executive level over the last three to four years.

[The Chair, NDP, Pierre-Luc Dusseault]

Thank you, Mr. Trottier.

Mr. Ravignat now has the floor.

[Mathieu Ravignat, NDP, Pontiac, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Your report describes new performance agreements that have been in place since April 1, 2014. I'd like to know what these performance agreements contain.

[Wayne Wouters]

Mr. Chair, I just went through the overall approach. Let me run through this again. Under the director of performance management, we are introducing for the first time overall systematic mandatory performance assessments of all our employees. So essentially the key element of this is that every employee will have a clear understanding of their performance objectives and expectations at the start of the year.

By the way, when I started in the public service of Canada, this was common practice. We kind of lost our way in this area. It's very helpful to know exactly what the expectations of the employer are at the start of the year.